I didn’t go looking for this. These three stories came to me independently, from different sources, from different parts of the world, but all within a day or two of each other. And all describing agriculture in crisis.
Market diversity
Markets are fascinating. Wherever I go in the world, I consider it a real treat to be able to wander very slowly through the markets, seeing what there is, seeing whether I can identify things I’ve only read about, just soaking it up. Kunming is no exception.
Starch and human diversity
Human diversity and agricultural biodiversity interact. The variation that exists between and within crops and livestock products in nutritional content is to some extent matched by — and indeed there is evidence that in some cases it has driven — genetic variation between and within the human populations that make use of them. We’ve blogged about this with regard to lactose intolerance and predisposition to iron deficiency. Now comes a study 1 linking variation among human populations in the number of copies of the amylase gene with the amount of starch in their diet 2
More “contaminated” bison
The ancestors of the bison, or buffaloes, of Catalina Island off the California coast arrived as movie extras in 1924. Scientists have always thought they were more likely to be pure-bred than many of the other buffalo that roam North America, because they’ve effectively been in isolation. Turns out it ain’t so. Nearly half the animals shipped off the island have maternal cow genes. Scientists believe the cross breeding probably occurred before the buffalo were shipped to Catalina — and nothing since 1924 has selected against it.
P.S. As the commenter to our original piece pointed out, nobody seems to have looked for bison genes in cattle. Why not?
E-agriculture practitioners meet
It’s E-Agriculture Week in Rome next week. Lots of people coming, lots of stuff going on. I’ll try to be very Web 2.0 about it and do some posting when cool agricultural biodiversity comes up, but also check out the blog of the centerpiece conference.